Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots Read Online Free PDF Page A

fifty million years old. But look at me. I’m up. I’m at ’em.
    I thought,
If he loves me enough, he’ll get up on the count of three.
If he wants to go on living, he’ll feed himself on Thursday. He’ll get dressed. He’ll rinse a glass. He’ll walk fifteen steps. He’ll ask for the paper. He’ll pee standing up. He’ll turn off the light. He’ll grip my shoulders and say exactly this with an ironic grin: “I love you so much that I cannot live without you. So I won’t die. I’ll live so we can live together.”
    I looked at him now. I loved him so much it made my hands tremble.
    I used all my strength to sit him up and pour water into his mouth. I grunted but hid it with a cough. It would have killed him to see my face wincing as I moved him from the bed to the chair, to know the way it shot hot daggers down my back.
    “Hello there,” I said. He looked around. He was a child, lost in Central Park. I waited, expectantly.
    “If I went out,” he said, “who would let me back in?”
    Suddenly, I had the urge to yell at him. Then I had the urge to weep. The guilt always came later, an aftershock. He was home, I wanted to tell him. He was in his study with two walls of fraying brown cookbooks mixed in with Rumi, Rudaki, Hafez, Bellow, and Roth. But it wouldn’t help to explain it. I wasn’t delusional about that. In my head, I said,
Please. Figure it out.
    His eyes darted around, looking for clues. I adjusted the brown blanket I’d knitted myself around his shoulders. “Remember this?” I said, pulling a corner to his face. Nothing.
    I motioned toward the set of framed eighteenth-century spoons. “Remember these?” I asked. Again, nothing. It wasn’t dementia. Nothing as simple as that. It was cancer, pain meds, depression, exhaustion. It was that sometimes he couldn’t bear to be present, to look down at himself and see what he saw. So he checked out. Gone fishing. I’d almost punched a nurse when she said, “Here one minute, gone the next,” but she had a point. He was like a bulb, flickering on and off according to some erratic electrical current inside of him that I was desperate to rewire and fix.
    I brought him the photo of his father’s chicken stall in the Baghdadi market. There were white snowflakes against the lens. “Remember them?” I asked. I looked at Joseph but he wasn’t looking at the picture. He’d begun to stare past things with his dull, weak eyes—a selective blindness.
    On particularly bad days, I’d wonder if my only hope, his only hope, was to bring up our deepest secret, the one thing we never discussed, never mentioned. I didn’t want to, dreaded it. It was desperate, a last resort, but we were at that point. If there was ever a time for candor, it was now. Forgiveness, now. Regrets, confessions, concessions, empathy, desperation, and exaggeration: now.
    I wondered if everyone had a secret like this, something slightly wretched, bent and corroded with time, like a lost key that might not even unlock anything anymore. And if, in the end, it might be the only thing that mattered.
    All those years ago, I gave up our baby. Joseph didn’t want to. Hated it. I said it was to protect us, what we had. But she followed us everywhere, like a chill that we could not shake. I tried never to miss her. Joseph must have done the same. It was what kept us together and broke us apart. How much of what we said was an attempt to not say something else? It was so easy to talk about everything—and so we did. Bad lettuce, broken sidewalks, static on the television, the way our fingers swelled in the summer. We became who we became because of what wasn’t there. What wasn’t there became what was.
    Still, on these new very bad days, I considered bringing her up in order to awaken him. I would ask him if he missed her. If he’d ever looked for her. Most of all, I wanted to know what I’d done, what I’d stolen—to hear it from him. What we were was never enough.
    But I’d never