In case you missed it last Friday, I posted the first part of a two-part short story.  I’m not waiting until this Friday to post the conclusion, because Fridays are slow days on teh internets.

Her Dying Wish (Part 2)

Normally, Saturday mornings were for her (as they are for everybody–as they are for you) bliss.  Waking up is a delight because you have slept well, your subconscious untroubled in slumber by the unpleasant prospect of being woken by an alarm and having to go to work and finding repose in the freedom of an entire day ahead of you to do as you please–or, if you are dying, an entire day to do the things you always wanted to do before you die.

This Saturday, however, she awoke feeling as if she had never slept at all.  She did not remember in any detail the nightmares of Soviet hostels that had prevented her achieving rest, but she vividly recalled her previous night’s struggle with disloyalty to Heavenly Cloud, and hated herself a little now for her reaction of dread for her physical comfort when she became aware of her need for the bathroom, which was precisely the terror that had troubled her sleep.  And when she discovered that the first roll of toilet paper had not been an anomaly in the package, all thoughts were forgotten of how she was going to seize her remaining days.

She retreated to bed, curled up in a fetal position, and resisted the temptation to open her laptop and try to restore the document she had deleted last night.

The extraordinary thing, however, was that if you saw her that day, hiding in her bed from herself and her deepest-seated impulses, you would not have thought her pathetic.  And if you’d known her before she thought she was dying of melanoma, you would say that she had never been this passionate, for good or ill, about anything but Heavenly Cloud toilet paper in her whole life to date.  You would choose to be around this version of her rather than the old, because now even though Heavenly Cloud was, once more, the instigator of her passion, something else lurked beneath the surface.  Something interesting and even inspiring.  The very thing, in fact, which John Roberts observed in her when he watched her run riot through the supermarket.  A few minutes with her would, inevitably, have you thinking of an un-hatched egg which, the night before, had an unblemished shell but which, by this morning, had gained a crack from the chick’s first peck of its tiny beak.

By Sunday, the use of Heavenly Cloud toilet paper had caused even more cracks in the veneer.  Unfortunately, the first person who saw her was Mrs. Reverend Green, who mistook them for simply cracking up.

It can hardly come as a surprise to you that someone who purchased her favorite brand of toilet paper for complete strangers in the supermarket also had been known to tell fellow members of her church that if the custodian someday ceased to purchase Heavenly Cloud for the church bathrooms (he thought less about comfort than about the fact that the brand name had a certain churchy-ness about it) she would have to consider changing congregations.  So, after she’d been tortured for two days by the new formula she thought church would give her sanctuary.  The last thing she needed on top of melanoma was a kidney backup.

Good news was, she didn’t get a kidney backup.

Bad news was, she developed a case of adult-onset potty mouth.

Glossing over the exact words she used, we shall simply say that she found no relief in the first stall of the ladies’ room…

…or the second…

…or the third…

…and saw a loathed diamond weave pattern staring back at her with mockery in its pinprick eyes.

For good measure, she told the moron who built the church and hung all the doors so that they swung inward instead of out where he could go.

“Merciful heavens.”

The merciful heavens were quite the opposite of where she had told Gary Burns to go; they were, however, what Mrs. Reverend Green entreated when she entered the ladies’ room with Nola Davies (who was, at age 97, the oldest member of the congregation and, frighteningly, still drove herself to every church service) and heard the un-churchly words echo from the last stall.

Any other church member, having been caught using bad language in front of Mrs. Green and Nola Davies, would have shuffled meekly out of that bathroom stall, red-faced and unable to make eye contact.  Any other church member would have apologized profusely, made excuses, and prayed God was too busy resting on the Sabbath to notice what words came out of one woman’s mouth.

Not her.

She laughed.

For as she emerged from the last stall and saw Mrs. Green standing in the doorway, a fog she hadn’t been aware of previously cleared from her mind.  Once she’d dreamed about saying a bad word at church.  Mrs. Green’s  dream face had looked just like it did now, a caricature of scandalized.  She was tempted to say another one just so she could snap a picture with her camera phone to record the expression.

If you asked her why she wanted a picture, she would tell you so she could look back and find this perfect happiness again when life inevitably made it elude her–which the melanoma she might (or might not) have would do soon enough.

But she didn’t curse again, or get out her camera phone.  If you asked her why, she would have told you that it was because this wasn’t perfect happiness–though she felt closer to it than when she was wreaking havoc in the Though Shalt Not Touch Aisle or writing her complaint letter/horror story.

Now, for the first time, she feared her imminent death.  She wasn’t ready to go yet, not without having achieved perfect happiness.  All her life she’d thought it would come from a European vacation or writing a novel, or, by a very slight chance, from skydiving.  But now she knew the key to that happiness lay within her. There was only one thing she could do to find it.

And she had to do it now.

“I’m going home sick,” she said.  “Melanoma, you know.”

She was out the door and on her way, and so missed Mrs. Green shaking her head and saying that, melanoma or not, there was never an excuse to use bad language, and Nola seasoning her speech with salt in a way the Bible didn’t exactly mean.

“I’d sign up for melanoma if it meant I could do the things I always dreamed of and look that happy,” she cried.  “Now help me wash my hands!”

#

If you asked her how she expected to feel and what she expected to happen when she sent the Heavenly Cloud manufacturer a complaint email about the new toilet paper formula, she would have told you stonily:  “Nothing.  I have no expectations.”

The truth was, before she sent the email, she expected to hit ‘send’ and immediately burst out laughing, her head thrown back as it had been that day in the supermarket when she broke the jars of pickles and realized she’d just given in to a heart’s desire.  There had been glee in punching ire into her keyboard, a heart-pumping exhilaration at clicking ‘send’–but it all fled, and no happiness, not even imperfect happiness, took its place.

This was, of course, because it was the results of these actions, the reactions–the supermarket employee running frantically with mop and caution sign to clean up the spilled pickle juice before someone slipped and filed a lawsuit; Mrs. Green looking so scandalized to hear swear words at church–that she had always longed for, not actually the little rebellions against society in and of themselves.

The truth of this hit her as the message went whizzing through cyberspace, and she let out a cry as though struck in the chest.

A complaint email could only be satisfactory if she got an email back in reply, and whether any such thing would appear in her inbox was highly debatable.  Doubtful, even.  Unlikely, as customer service representatives in general weren’t exactly known for providing satisfactory responses to anything.  She definitely wouldn’t hear anything immediately, as today was Sunday.

Also, there simply wasn’t much you could say back to, “Heavenly Cloud would be more aptly renamed Hell Fire,” especially when it was signed, “a very dissatisfied customer who is dying of melanoma and would prefer her last days to be as blissful as the heavenly cloud she will soon inhabit.”

She held out half a hope that maybe the person in the complaint department would also have recently learned he was dying and answer as an act of impulse.  There was nothing to expect except that this would be out of her system, and she would not die and haunt the world as a ghost because she’d left business unfinished.  Because she knew now that she hadn’t really wanted to travel to Europe, write a novel, or skydive before she died.

There was one thing she was expecting, which she had all but forgotten, and that was that her dermatologist was due to call her on Monday with the results of her mole biopsy.  This was not the sort of thing most people forgot.  Since she had diagnosed herself with terminal cancer from the onset, she had not given a second thought to the fact that nothing about her health was actually confirmed.  Thus, fearful expectation of test results had no part in the despondency that fell over her upon emailing the manufacturer.  Instead, it was pure confusion about her desires and what it meant to be happy.  If it had all only been about getting something out of her system, then why had it made her so deliriously glad, teasing her with the promise of perfect bliss?

She slept badly–again–and woke Monday morning in a worse state than she had even after that first morning of using the horrible toilet paper.  She called in sick from work; if she didn’t really know any more what she wanted to do before she died, she at least knew she didn’t want to be at work.  Though she was not consciously expecting anything from this day, her manager thought she sounded anxious–like she’d received a death threat.  Indeed, if you saw her then, you would inevitably think once more of that hatching egg, the shell no longer smooth, unbroken white, but cracked all over and shifting like a miniature buckling of tectonic plates as the little bird within pecked and flapped with frail, new wings.

And then, just as she was drifting off into depressed slumber, her phone rang.

Her heart began to pound.

“Your biopsy’s negative.  You just have a weird mole.  Or had.  It’s the lab’s now.”

Fifteen words.

Fifteen words from a receptionist were all her heart required to break.

She wasn’t dying.

It made sense, considering she’d never felt ill or displayed any other symptom of melanoma.  Her socially deviant behavior, of course, though uncharacteristic for her, would not have been physically connected to cancer even if her mole biopsy had come back malignant.

But it had not.

She supposed she ought to be relieved and thankful, but she was far from it.  She wasn’t dying, but now that she’d done all she wanted to do before she died, she wasn’t sure she had anything left to live for.

All she had to live with was a lot of guilt that came down on her so crushingly that all she could do was lie prone on her bed.

Up till now, she’d not felt badly for a single thing she’d done, her supposed impending death giving her a sort of immunity.  In this moment of learning that she would live on and on, however, bravado fled, and she was pummeled with accusations from her conscience:  destruction of property, coarse language, harassment…And it made her furious.  She had been duped.  Deceived by that serpent who promised knowledge and happiness.  Suckered into sinning, coerced into criminal acts…

Now, this feeling she was mistaking for guilt was actually sorrow that she’d been caught.  If you were dying, no one could excommunicate you or send you to prison.  And that was really all she was thinking now: what did Mrs. Green think of her now for swearing at church?  And Nola Davies?

(Nola was, in fact, praying not to die before next Sunday so she could again see that young woman who swore like a sailor in front of Mrs. Green and was so happy.)

She even felt sick–irrationally–over what that man who’d asked her out in the Thou Shalt Not Touch Aisle thought of her.  She must have been mistaken about his asking her out; he could only have been trying to mortify her, in some roundabout way, for her rude, crude, and socially unacceptable behavior.

As it turned out, John Roberts was not an irrational thought, as her brain told her, but the key to everything.  The proof that what she was feeling was not guilt, as she erroneously believed, came when there was a knock at her apartment door.

The first thought it prompted was that if there was anything she wanted to do before she died, it was never answer a door again.  But she got up anyway–not really weighed down by immobilizing guilt.

Standing on her tip-toes to look out the peephole, she saw a man in a suit, with his collar open and his tie undone.  On one shoulder he balanced a large, lumpy, blue and white parcel.

Curiosity distracted her from the fact that her heart was no longer in her chest where it was supposed to be, but residing considerably further north, cutting off her flow of air.  When she opened the door the first thing out of her mouth was not, “You’re the handsome executive who asked me out,” but instead was, “Is that…toilet paper?”

It was, and before John could answer, she noted the blue label and told him, “I only use Heavenly Cloud, though I guess I’ll have to switch brands since they changed the formula–”

“Did you buy the Heavenly Cloud in the red package?”

She thought for a moment, more about the fact that she’d previously missed what a pleasantly low, soft quality there was to his voice, than about his question.  It was exactly the male voice she’d always wanted to hear addressing her, pronouncing her name, but had all but given up on hearing, as dates became fewer and farther between.

“Yes,” she answered.

“You should’ve bought the Heavenly Cloud in the blue package.”  John lowered it from his shoulder and held it out to her so that she could see that the plastic wrap read, ‘New!  Heavenly Cloud Ultra Soft.’

“I don’t understand.”  She opened the door a little wider and stepped backward, further into her apartment.  “I’ve always bought the Heavenly Cloud in the red package.  It was always soft enough.”

Beneath his dark hair, his forehead creased.  “I knew the packaging would be confusing.  Our traditional red look went to the Ultra Strong formula.  That’s why it felt like Quilt Thick.”

He tried to press the toilet paper into her hands, and now the twelve-pack fell onto both their toes as she let out a gasp of realization.

“You’re the guy who reads the company’s complaint emails?”  Her face flushed violently hot.

“Not normally.  I’m the External Relations Manager, but I’ve been looking at the complaint emails since we revamped our product.  Yours was the first thing I saw when I went in this morning.”

“Great external relations.”

John grinned.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mary.

Or is it Mary Beth?  And that was a great email.  Instrument of torture in a Soviet hostel, huh?”

She went by just plain Mary, but was too flummoxed to tell him.  “You knew it would be me here.  How?”

“You said you were dying of melanoma.  I saw you buy Heavenly Cloud Ultra Strong.  I knew you were a woman who does whatever you please, even if it’s not a social norm, and that it makes you very happy.”  His Adam’s apple bobbed, and his gaze flicked down to her lips.  His tongue darted out to moisten his own.  “I just knew.”

Mary held the doorknob for support, and she felt herself swaying toward him.  But she held back, a lump suddenly lodging in her throat.  “I’m not.”

“Not what?”

“Not dying and not happy and not doing what I please.  The serpent–”

“The serpent?  Are you sure your name isn’t Eve?”  He grinned; it was a smile she couldn’t help returning.  “No, it was all you, Mary Beth, and you’re definitely a happy woman, and I have to say I’m very, very happy to hear you’re not dying.”  John leaned toward her, reached out as if to touch her, but then withdrew.  “What do you say we go to a fancy restaurant tonight?  You can go in jeans and a t-shirt, and I–well, I’ve always wanted to put ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’ to a test.  Haven’t you?”

#

From that moment onward, if you asked Mary Beth Jameson what she wanted to do before she died, she would tell you things surprising and remarkable: not to travel to Europe (though she and John had booked a ski trip to Switzerland for this coming Christmas), not to write a novel, nor to go skydiving, not even if she was feeling adventurous when you asked her.

(Although, that did not mean she was opposed to the idea; in fact, she and Nola Davies had signed up to take skydiving lessons.  But that was Nola Davies’ dream, not hers.)

If she told you what she did want to do before she died, you would not believe her, because these were not the things everyone wanted to do before they died–certainly not the things you yourself want to do before you die.

Or at least not the things you yourself admit to wanting to do before you die.

Regardless of whether or not you believed she really wanted to do these things, if she told you she wanted to, she would be telling you the truth.  Because unlike everyone else who said they wanted to travel to Europe or write a novel before they died, Mary Beth Jameson had actually done the things she had always wanted to do before she died, was doing them on a regular basis, because the only thing she had really wanted to do before she died was to live.

And she began by putting the rest of her package of Heavenly Cloud to good use…

…TPing Reverend and Mrs. Green’s house.