Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) Read Online Free Page A

on whole wheat (not too much tuna—we didn’t like fat sandwiches) or ham and cheese on whole wheat from the deli two blocks away, or soup from Au Bon Pain in the lobby of the hospital.
    We gave the script to the producer, Scott Rudin. He read it within a day or two. This promptness was unusual in my experience, especially since he had no idea that, as they say regarding movie plot gimmicks, there was a ticking clock.
    We were going to have a notes meeting. This was all in the context of the secrecy of Nora’s illness. Like manypeople, Rudin knew that Nora was in the hospital, but not that her situation was serious.
    Dragging the chemotherapy drip to which she was tethered twenty-four hours a day (but was soon to be untethered from, making the meeting possible), Nora and I scouted the café on the fourth floor as a potential location. It was quite pretty—modern, blond wood. I think there was a waterfall. (Perhaps I’ve invented the waterfall. Waterfalls are soothing and peaceful—the hospital should install one if it isn’t there already.) This briefest of treks was almost jaunty. Not at all, of course, and yet . . . we’d scouted locations together before. Some joy of past adventures, a familiar fun way of being together, buoyed us the tiniest bit. (I wonder if I’ve imagined this in retrospect, this uptick in mood lasting maybe ten minutes. I’d hate to be romanticizing even a second of this awfulness.) In the end we did the notes meeting on the phone: Nora in bed, me in the chair, the cell phone on speaker lying on the sheet between us like another patient, an itty bitty one.
    She got into a disagreement about the ending. She was weakened by this time, and the heart monitor started beeping, too. It was a madness. She dug in her heels—would Martha be assigned to the bank at the end of episode one? Nora would not agree to it . . . in her way, notarguing, simply refusing to accede. They hit a bit of an impasse. I was thinking,
Who cares?
But of course you have to care, because if you don’t, it’s the end. Right? I guess. I don’t really know. If you were an actor playing Nora, arguing about something that inconsequential, that would be the subtext, you have to keep caring or you’re dead, that would layer it with meaning. Perhaps in life it was what it was: simply in character. Or a blessed minute of normalcy.
    One day I was writing a scene, it was about four o’clock, which is when I always need a latte. I was at the computer. She was in bed. Truly, I was groggy with exhaustion. “I can’t write this scene, I’m too tired,” I said.
    “Yes, you can,” she said.
    I did. It wasn’t a bad scene. She liked it. “Oh, this is good.” I loved getting compliments from her. I loved it so much, I often didn’t show her things to free me of the need.
    This collaboration was only a small part of what life was. This alternate universe. All of us caring for her were living in an alternate universe, as was she. The pilot made it a double alternate. An alternate alternate. Beyond beyond. Anyone who is in the hospital or trying to care for someone in a hospital knows how real life evaporates.
    One day Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, wasgoing to testify before something like Congress—it would be on C-SPAN. “We should watch,” said Nora. But we didn’t.
    That’s the last I remember of us and
George and Martha
. The cancer or the chemotherapy or a combination of both now had the upper hand.
    I was scrolling through e-mails to find out when that was. How far from the end? E-mails might give me a hint because it was our habit to e-mail the script at the end of the day. If we were at her apartment, we e-mailed it to me, and vice versa. We had continued to do this, although less regularly, at the hospital. I was unable to pinpoint the date (my guess is about ten days before she died). Instead I found, from the end of January through April, a slew of e-mails about my living room couch. “My couch is