Let Me Have a Turn
A Story About What We Carry Alone, and the People Who Finally Make Us Put It Down
There is a particular silence that belongs to people who are keeping something from you.
Not the ordinary silence of people who are busy or distracted or simply have nothing to say. A different kind. The silence that has weight to it, that occupies space in a room, that makes the air feel thick in a way you can sense before you can explain. The silence of people who know something you don’t and have decided, for reasons of their own, that this is not the moment to change that.
I had walked into that silence on a Tuesday afternoon in November carrying a lunch bag and a piece of apple pie.
I remember the pie specifically.
Ben loved apple pie. Not the fancy kind with lattice crust and spiced filling — the plain kind, the kind his mother made, the kind that looked slightly imperfect and tasted exactly right. I had been making it for eleven years and I still did not do it quite the way she had, but he always said it was perfect, which was either a lie or a more complicated truth about the value of the attempt over the execution.
I had wrapped the pie in paper and put it in the bag with his lunch, and I had written him a note on the back of a receipt because I couldn’t find notepaper:
You don’t have to take care of everyone. Let me have a turn.
Driving to the hospital, I had felt the specific hopeful nervousness of a wife doing something small and loving for a husband she was worried about. Not the nervous-exciting feeling of early marriage, when everything was charged with newness. The steadier nervousness of eleven years in — the nervousness of someone who knows a person completely and is watching that person carry something too heavy and wants, desperately, to do something about it.
I had not known, on the drive to the hospital, how much I was not knowing.
I understood that as soon as I saw Karen’s face at the nurses’ station.
I need to tell you about Ben.
Not the version of Ben that the hospital knew — the talented surgeon, the colleague, the doctor whose hands could do things other hands couldn’t. That Ben existed, and he was real, and I admired him. But the Ben I am telling you about is the one who came home at eleven o’clock and sat on the edge of our bed with his shoulders shaking.
The one who said rough night and go back to sleep and turned away from me.
He was forty-two years old when this story takes place. He had been a surgeon for fifteen years. He had the kind of career that people describe in terms of dedication and sacrifice, and both of those words are true and both of them understate something that is much more complicated, which is that certain kinds of work do not leave you at the end of the day, that certain kinds of things witnessed do not go back to being unwitnessed when you drive home.
He was good at what he did.
He was also, in the way of people who are very good at certain things, not always good at the other things — the asking for help, the saying when something was hard, the allowing of someone else to carry part of what he was carrying.
I had known this about him for eleven years.
I had loved him for it and been frustrated by it in equal measure, the way you are frustrated and in love simultaneously when someone’s essential quality is also the thing that makes certain conversations impossible.
I had been watching him disappear for a year.
That is not too strong a word. He had always worked hard, always been present at the hospital in a way that took him away from home more than I would have chosen. But there is a difference between a person who is busy and a person who is disappearing, and for the past year I had been watching my husband disappear in some way that I could not name clearly because he would not let me get close enough to see it directly.
The missed dinners, the missed birthday, the missed Thanksgiving — I had stored these up not as grievances but as data, as evidence that something was wrong that was different from the ordinary wrong of a surgeon’s schedule. The shaking shoulders in the dark. The go back to sleep. The way he looked when he finally came home, not tired exactly but hollowed out, like something had taken up residence in the space behind his eyes and was consuming things from the inside.
I had asked.
Every time I asked, he said he was fine.
I had learned to read his fine the way you learn to read a loved one’s particular silences, and his fine did not mean fine. It meant I am not ready to have this conversation and it meant please don’t push and it meant if I talk about it, it becomes real in a way I cannot manage right now.
So I had waited.
And I had made apple pie.
And I had driven to the hospital on a Tuesday afternoon to bring him lunch, because I did not know what else to do, and because the note I had written said what I meant: let me have a turn.
Karen looked at me the way people look at you when they are deciding something rapidly about how much you need to know.
She was one of the senior nurses in Ben’s unit. We had known each other for seven or eight years, the way spouses of hospital staff know the hospital staff — not intimately, but with the comfortable familiarity of people who appear at the same holiday parties and ask about each other’s families. She was warm and competent and had a laugh that arrived before the joke was finished. She had always been glad to see me.
She was not glad to see me now.
Is Ben around? I asked. And please, no warning him. He’ll just tell me not to bother.
She looked at the nurse beside her.
Something passed between them that I felt in my chest before I understood it.
Did something happen to him? My voice was already doing the thing voices do when fear is approaching faster than the mind can process it. Where’s Ben?
Neither of them answered.
Arnold came across the corridor toward us.
Arnold Reyes was Ben’s colleague — another surgeon, a few years younger, someone Ben had mentored in the early years when Arnold first joined the hospital. They had been friends in the way that hospital colleagues become friends: forged by the specific pressure of shared experience, by nights when things went badly and the only people who understood were the people who had been there. Ben talked about Arnold the way he talked about a few select people — with the particular warmth reserved for those who had actually seen you under pressure.
Arnold’s face, when he reached us, was not the face of a man seeing his colleague’s wife stop by unexpectedly.
It was the face of a man who has been sitting with something very heavy and has just had the weight redistributed without warning.
He looked at me.
Then his eyes filled with tears.
He hasn’t told you anything, has he?
I sat down on a chair in the corridor because my legs stopped being entirely reliable.
Arnold sat next to me.
He was quiet for a long moment, and I was quiet, and the hospital moved around us with the specific indifferent rhythm of a place where significant things happen all the time and the machinery of it doesn’t stop for any individual significant thing.
Where is Ben? I asked.
He’s in the oncology unit, Arnold said.
I looked at him.
As a patient?
Arnold nodded.
The word patient landed in the center of my chest and spread outward.
Since when?
He was admitted four days ago. Arnold looked at his hands. He’s been — Sarah, he’s been managing this for about eight months. On his own. He didn’t — he asked us not to tell you.
Eight months.
I thought about eight months. I counted backward from November. March. He had known since March.
I thought about Thanksgiving, missed. Our anniversary, missed. Emma’s birthday, missed. The shaking shoulders in the dark at two in the morning. The rough night. The go back to sleep.
He had known since March and he had been protecting me from it since March and I had been watching him disappear and calling it tiredness and waiting for him to let me in and the whole time the door had been locked from the inside by a man who had decided, in whatever private calculation he had made, that he could carry this alone.
What is it? I asked Arnold.
He told me.
Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Diagnosed in the spring after a scan he had ordered for himself when some symptoms persisted longer than he could explain away. He had managed his own consultations, his own treatment plan, his own schedule of chemotherapy infusions that he had arranged to coincide with his days off. He had been driving himself to treatments and driving himself home and walking back into our life as though nothing was happening.
For eight months.
Why didn’t he tell me? I heard myself say, and the question was not angry yet — it was not anything yet except baffled, the specific bafflement of learning something that reorganizes your entire understanding of a period of time you thought you understood.
Arnold was quiet.
You’d have to ask him, he said. But I think — I think Ben is a man who takes care of people. That’s what he does. Taking care of people is his whole identity. And the idea of you having to take care of him— Arnold stopped. Collected himself. He said once that he couldn’t bear to watch you be afraid. He said you’d spent eleven years sharing him with the hospital and he wasn’t going to spend whatever time he had making you sit in waiting rooms.
I thought about the note in the lunch bag.
You don’t have to take care of everyone. Let me have a turn.
I had written that note not knowing anything.
I had written that note and put it under a fork and driven to the hospital to bring him lunch, and the note had been, without my knowing it, the exact right thing and the exact wrong context.