The Soft Middle

I knew exactly three things about the young woman in front of me.

Here name was Annabelle Del Toro

Her boyfriend of four years left her three days ago.

She was diagnosed as inoperably terminal.

I knew all of this before we had ever spoken a word to one another.

“Take a picture, it will last longer.” I realized she had caught me staring at her. She tugged on her navy blue hoodie sleeve, pulling it over her hands against the chilly train-station air. It was six in the morning and the train station was mostly empty, flickering fluorescent lights overhead dimly illuminating the platform. Overhead, the departure board clicked.

TRACK 9: 0630: Coastal Rail line – Non-stop

“You’re pretty,” I got out. She raised an eyebrow, it pulled her freckled face almost into a smile.

“That’s what you’re going with, huh?”

“I’m sorry. I’m not good at this.”

“At staring at women?”

“Yes…I mean, no. I mean, at talking to people. I’m weird.” She paused at that, a little taken aback. She stared up at the sign and sighed.

“I keep staring at it, hoping it tells me something,” as she looks back at me.

“It won’t.”

“Oh yeah? You psychic or something?”

“Not really psychic…I just know things. I know your name is Annabelle. I know your boyfriend left you because he couldn’t handle things. I also know you were diagnosed as terminal and told you were going to die soon.” She stiffened, gripping the straps of her knapsack.

“That… that’s not funny. Look, I don’t know who told you, but that’s super un-cool,” she said, anger flashing behind her eyes. Immediately, I regretted my inability to turn off the flow from brain to mouth. It’s probably why nobody stuck around me for very long.

“I don’t. Nobody told me.” I stammered back.

“Oh yeah, how did you know?” I shrugged again.

“I just, know things about people. I can’t explain it. I’m sure you don’t believe me, and if you do I’m sure you want me to go away,” I looked down at my worn and dirty shoes.

“How does it work? I mean, I have told one person, my ex, and he left. Said ‘I can’t do this’ and packed up and left and lord knows, he would never share that because it may tarnish his ever-so-deliberate facade of civility. Even my mom doesn’t know. So, let’s say I believe you… how does it work?”

“It’s like a memory. When you smell cut grass, that brings back a memory for most people. You can’t stop it or control it. When I see someone, I ‘remember’ things about them. Things I can’t possibly know.” I feel the words coming out, almost rehearsed, as I explained my condition. I had a bicycle accident in college. It left me physically and financially ruined, scarred, and with the tragic gift that would drive off any and all of my very few friends.

“That’s how you knew I was going to die?” she asked, pulling her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She put her chin on her knees and stared at me.

“I said diagnosed” I corrected. Her face pinched and looked at me. “There’s a difference.” I continued. “I. Um. Also know when people die.” There it was. Typically the line before the fleeing of people from me or the laughter. I received neither.

“So you know how everyone dies?”

“Not everyone. It’s like looking at a distant island. I can see this side, that you were diagnosed, and I can see the far side which is when people die but I can’t see anything between here and there. I don’t know details. I know the beginning and the end, but I can’t tell you how the story ends or even what happens between now and then. So I can just say the day.”

“That is a horrible thing to say to me today. So you know when I am going to die. Bup bup bup. Don’t you dare.” She held up a finger to silence any blurting of dates.

“Yes. I also know when I die. Today.” Her anger didn’t subside but rather shifted, joined by something else.

“Why are you here?” she asked, changing the subject.

I shrugged and told the truth. “I didn’t want to die in my apartment alone. I figure here at least someone will care, even if it’s because I’m suddenly a massive inconvenience.” She softened. Her chin lifted off her knees ever so slightly. “I don’t really have anyone. Everyone leaves me. I’m a freak to them.”

“Do you tell people they are going to die when you talk to them often?”

 “Not anymore, but mostly because I don’t typically talk to people anymore. My last friend left me because I told him his wife is cheating on him. He didn’t like me telling him. I don’t understand why. But really, when I die, nobody will know because nobody cares”

She rummages around in her bag and produces a ticket. “I bought a ticket to ride. If you want to come with, we can both ride to the coast on our last day.” She dug into her bag again and produced a napkin and a pen and scribbled on it. She got up and walked over to me and handed me the napkin. I looked down and read it.

I care

“That’s one person that cares.”

“How can you care? You don’t even know me?”

“I didn’t say deeply. But you’re a person and because everyone should be missed by someone. My dog will miss me at least. My dog, Chewy.” The sign above clicked and indicated boarding would begin. “Come on then, let’s take our last trip.” I gripped the napkin tight. For the first time in what seemed to be forever someone saw what I was and didn’t run. I followed her to the boarding door.

The fog along the coast in the early morning light flew past us as we rode in the car. We sat alongside each other in the coach seating, though this early trip had few people and nobody sat near us. She had so many questions. She wanted to know about the bicycle accident and how I ended up where I was. What did it feel like and was I ever wrong.

She told me about the hospital appointments and the sterilized rooms with nobody beside her. Her relationship that had struggled the moment she got sick and when she finally was told, how he had said that he couldn’t be there for her. Then she asked how accurate my premonitions were.

“I’m never wrong. My date popped into my head and I panicked. I went to a hospital and walked around, knowing when people would die. Then I would hunt the obituaries for them and I was right. Every. Single. Time. I so desperately wanted it to be delusion. I’d rather be crazy than some doomsayer that robbed you of your time.”

“So you were never wrong?”

“Not once.”

“That’s… horrible.” We sat in silence and then she looked at me. “So, that means you know everyone’s page count.”

“What?”

“Books. You know exactly how many pages everybody gets.”

“I guess so, yeah. That is exactly what it’s like.”

The silence hung between, I heard the question before it was asked. Not because of any premonition, but experience that taught me. “What about me?” she asked.

“I shouldn’t”

“But you know.” A statement. Not a question.

“Yes. But every time I tell someone, they leave and I have no desire to be alone again.”

“I guess that’s fair. I walked away from everything anyways. I figured, one last day to experience life before I’m too sick. The doctors told me weeks.”

“Don’t give up your lease, I will say that.” She looked at me sharply. I sighed. So much for controlling my mouth. “You’ll see your apartment again.”

“So you’re saying you know? How soon?”

“That’s what I’ve been saying. But knowing your page count sucks, so I don’t want to tell you. I don’t want to tell you and have you walk away like everyone else has.”

“Tell me. Tell me an over-under. Tell me a ballpark. I don’t need to know the day.”

“Seven years. You have at least seven years left. I don’t know how, but you do”.

A single tear rolled down her face. “He left because he couldn’t handle the timeline,” and she leaned against my shoulder. She wasn’t dying today. She was just a woman, riding with a man who was, in fact, dying today.

The small coastaltown was waking up as the train pulled in. We disembarked the train and the smell of the coast hit me. It had been years since I had been to the coast. The sounds of gulls and smell of ocean salt filled me with a warmth in contrast to the brisk morning air. We walked towards the boardwalk and bought terrible coffee from the coffee shop outside the train station. I reveled walking next to her. I had told her and she hadn’t left. We walked down the boardwalk and she stopped at a store.

“Let’s go in here!” she said. She grabbed my hand, her warm hand wrapping around mine. We walked into the store, a used bookshop, and the interior was cramped with rows of filled shelves. We perused the shelves, discovering the treasures arrayed on them to include reproductions of illuminated manuscripts to at least seven ‘Q’ editions of the encyclopedia Britannica. She paused at the end of a shelf and pulled a well-worn book with a green cover off the shelf.

Annabelle turned the volume over in her hands, examining it, and flipped it open. “Feel this” she said, grabbing my wrist and placing my hand on the edge of the book’s pages. “Someone loved this. They came back to this spot, again and again.”

“The middle?” I asked. Nobody turned to the middle of a book. Hooks and conclusions were all the rage. But not the middle.

“Not the end. Not the beginning. It wasn’t about how the book ended, it was what happened in the middle. They came back so many times, they wore it soft.” Her fingers traced the worn edges of the page. I’m buying this. I don’t even care what it is or what it’s about”. We brought the book to the cashier and she handed over a debit card to the cashier.

Emerging from the store, we sat on a bench overlooking the sea and sipped our cooling coffees. “Maybe the end doesn’t matter.” she stated, as if responding to a silent question. “But you gave me time back, so what do you want to do today? What were you really hoping to find at that station?”

I looked down at my lap, swirling my coffee. “I love you.” I blurted. I looked over at her and she was staring at me, barely contained laughter behind her eyes.

“How could you possibly love me?! It took my ex like two years to say that and, even then, it almost felt like he was reading the terms and conditions of a contract! So. How?”

“I’ve never said it before. Not to a girl. I wanted to before,” I trailed off. There are moments to stop talking and preserve one’s dignity. This moment was not one of those moments. “I don’t know what my plan was, I just know what I was missing. I’m 28, I’m dying, and I’ve never been with a woman, never loved a woman. I was hoping I would find a woman to kiss before I died. Just a kiss.”

I watched as her eyebrow arched as she processed this revelation. “So,” she began. “You went to the train station hoping to just kiss a girl?”

“I didn’t have time to develop a sophisticated strategy” I admitted.

“Clearly.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. It was warm. Brief. But caring. “There, you’ve been kissed by a girl with at least seven years left and questionable judgement.”

“You bought a book without knowing the title” I said, smiling now.

“Exactly. Questionable judgement.”

We talked on that bench for what must have been hours, though my watch told me it was only about 45 minutes. We discovered we both loved junk food and bad monster movies and so we got a motel room. The room was terrible with two beds and an ancient TV, which Annabelle loved. We stocked up on snacks at the nearby gas station and turned on the TV, navigating to the Syfy channel. We spent my last day doing absolutely nothing. We ate and watched bad movies. From donuts and dragons to slurpees and sharks. It was the best day of my life.

At some point Sharknado turned into a movie about spiders that then evolved into something about a crocodile hybrid. The soda became warm and somewhere along the way we stopped being on separate beds. Annabelle lay next to me, with her head on my shoulder and holding my hand. Our fingers were interlaced and her thumb traced small circles on my hand.

Then the tightness started.

It began in my chest. It wasn’t pain, but pressure. Everything started to feel heavier as though parts of me were disconnecting.

I ignored it at first.

It returned minutes later.

Annabelle sat up and looked at me. “Your heart is racing. Are you ok?” She leaned to grab for the dingy, corded motel phone to call for help.

“Please don’t. I’m fine.” It wasn’t precisely a lie. I was better at that exact moment than I had been for the rest of my life.

The tightness spread, and my hand began to tremble inside hers. She felt it immediately. Her expression changed. “You know, don’t you?” She was staring at me. I nodded. For the first time, she looked frightened. “Oh,” was all she managed. She leaned over me and took my face in her hands. “Look at me.” My eyes drifted. “Not the TV. Me.” I tried to focus on her. Brown eyes. Freckles. Blue hoodie. A streak of powdered sugar near her nose. It was the last face I would ever see.

“You came to the station because you wanted a girl to kiss you” she whispered.

I forced a smile. It was harder now. “Among other reasons.”

“It was a terrible plan.”

“It worked.”

She laughed, eyes wet, and pressed her forehead against mine. I could smell her and at the end I felt the connection I had sought my entire life. “I’m here” she whispered. Then she kissed me. Not on the cheek. Her lips pressed against mine and it struck me she tasted like blue soda and powdered sugar. That seemed important to me. The beautiful mundane. When she pulled away from me, I was still smiling.

My vision dimmed, darkness contracting from the sides. She lay back and pulled me with her until my head rested against her chest and both of her arms closed around me. Her heart hammered beneath my ear.

“You’re not alone.”

“I know.” Soon I couldn't see at all. Breathing had become work, each breath seeming farther away from the one before it.

Oddly, I wasn’t afraid. I was sad. I was sad that only at the eleventh hour did I find connection. That I spent so much time worrying about the ending. That things didn’t have to be grand to be wonderful and that the ordinary act of sharing a day watching TV had been the best day of my life.

Bad movies. Warm soda. Someone's head on your shoulder. A hand in yours. A woman with powdered sugar on her nose.

The soft middle. The part somebody stayed in long enough to wear it smooth.

“I’m never wrong,” I managed.

Her arms tightened around me. “I know.”

“I love you” I repeated.

“I know.”

The darkness felt almost like sleep, and in those last few seconds something occurred to me that never had before.

That morning I had sat beside a woman who believed her life was already over. I had always thought knowing someone’s count could only take time from them. But for once, it had allowed me to give some back.

My last breath left quietly.

Annabelle held him long after his breathing stopped. The television kept playing, and on the screen a monster destroyed Tokyo.

Eventually she pressed her lips into his hair.

“I could have loved you.”

After a while she sat up and slid a pillow under his head. She pulled the blanket over him, tucking it beneath his chin as you would a lover, a gesture that felt ridiculous after knowing him for less than a day. But after everything else, it felt natural.

On the bedside table were the half-finished sodas, remnants of their binging, and the crumpled napkin she had written on that morning.

I CARE

She picked it up and placed it inside the green book. She still hadn't looked at the title.

She went to leave and paused momentarily at the door. Chewy was waiting at home. Her apartment was waiting. So were ordinary mornings, bad coffee, books she might never finish, birthdays, rainstorms, mistakes, and people she had not met yet. Entire stretches of life no one had told her about.

“You gave me seven years,” she whispered.

Then she stepped outside. The ocean was black beneath the evening sky, and for the first time since her diagnosis, Annabelle did not know what came next, just that there was a next.

She intended to wear that middle soft.