Lend Me a Little More Time, to Forget You

My husband Grant Mason was the coldly efficient type, and nothing disgusted him more than pointless emotional drain.

For the company he'd built with his own hands, he laid down one iron rule: no office romances.

To help him keep up appearances, I stayed secretly married and carried our child for seven months.

At the company, only his secretary, Nora Henson, knew about us.

The morning sickness during my pregnancy was violent.

Everything but my swollen belly wasted away, thinner by the day.

He handed me a medical journal, flat as ever.

"The clinical data proves morning sickness is a normal hormonal change. What you're doing, blowing it out of proportion, is pure self-suggestion."

"Can't you learn something from Secretary Henson? Stop acting like a giant baby fishing for sympathy."

Then I got the report. Late-stage stomach cancer. Immediate termination of the pregnancy advised.

I'd just come back to the company to get him to sign it when I saw my husband, the man who always followed the rules, rushing into the elevator with Secretary Henson in his arms.

Secretary Henson gave an embarrassed little pout.

"It's just gastroenteritis, my legs are fine! Mr. Mason, aren't you afraid people will get the wrong idea?"

Grant's brows drew together.

"Stomach trouble is no small thing. Rules are made by people too."

In that moment, I swallowed the blood rising in my throat and slipped the diagnosis back into my bag.

That night, I tucked the Special Medical Treatment Spousal Informed Consent Form into the divorce papers and handed them all to him together.

He assumed I was using divorce to threaten him into going public with us again.

He didn't even look. He just signed his name on the documents, impatient.

"Penelope Larson, don't regret this. You brought it on yourself."

Looking at that signature pressed hard enough to score the page, I suddenly didn't want to explain anymore.

Since my life, my child, and my pain were nothing to you but a nuisance.

Then never mind.

With the little time I had left, I would disappear from your world completely.

......

After Grant finished signing, I didn't say another word. I put the documents into my bag, went back to the bedroom, and closed the door.

In the living room he was busy with a conference call, his voice coming through the gap under the door until very late.

At six the next morning, before I shouldered my bag and left, he still hadn't woken.

I stood in the entryway and looked toward the bedroom, then pulled the door open and left.

The obstetrics ward was on the seventh floor.

The nurse took my paperwork, her eyes catching on my belly.

"No family with you? You're pretty far along, and with your condition being what it is, the risk is very high."

"My husband already signed." I smiled a little. "He's busy."

The attending physician was named James, in his fifties, his eyes on the lab results the whole time he spoke.

"Ms. Larson, I have to be clear with you. You weigh only seventy-eight pounds right now, and the stomach tumor has already spread into your abdominal cavity. There's also"

He pushed the ultrasound sheet across to me.

"The fetus stopped developing at around twenty weeks. Because your body's functions have been failing, it was never expelled naturally."

I stared at him, stunned.

"What? The baby was already gone two months ago?"

He nodded.

"Ms. Larson, you have to understand your own condition first. A body that's malnourished, with a disease this serious, cannot carry a child."

"Right now we have to terminate the pregnancy and stabilize your vitals before we can even talk about a cancer treatment plan."

For nearly two months, I'd vomited so badly I couldn't get out of bed.

And because Grant thought my frequent early hospital visits were just self-suggestion, I'd missed two prenatal checkups.

So it turned out my child had died quietly, without a sound, long ago.

Early in the pregnancy I'd had stomach pains often, and the checkup doctor had written on the sheet that I should have an endoscopy.

Grant had said,

"As long as the prenatal numbers are normal, that's enough. Stop imagining problems and wasting time and energy."

Five months in, I once brought it up with my husband.

"Grant, why can't I feel the baby moving?"

His eyes on the meeting notes Nora Henson had just sent to his phone, he answered offhand,

"Fetal movement varies from person to person anyway. Don't manufacture anxiety out of your own subjective feelings."

Back then I'd felt a little embarrassed, wondering if I was being oversensitive again.

He'd always been more rational than me, always knew more.

In all our years together, every time he disagreed with something, he could produce papers and data to prove I was wrong.

Wrong often enough, I stopped trusting my own judgment.

At three in the afternoon, the nurse wheeled in the pre-op cart.

"Ms. Larson, it's time to go into the induced-labor room. Are you sure you don't want to notify your family?"

I looked up at the light in the ceiling, then picked up my phone and dialed my mother's number.

Her end was loud, oil crackling in the pan.

I heard someone placing an order.

"Two breakfast sandwiches and a coffee."

Mom asked in a rush,

"Penelope? What's wrong?"

I spoke carefully.

"Mom, I want to come home."

Her end went quiet for a second, then she lowered her voice.

"Did you fight with Grant again? Penelope, stop being so willful, don't get in the way of his work."

"You marrying him was the luckiest thing that ever happened to this family. Don't ruin a good life over nothing."

When I heard my mother's words, I understood.

At twenty-seven, I had nowhere to go back to.

My mother had spent her whole life giving in.

And she'd raised me the same way, that in a marriage a woman should swallow her pride and bear it all.

She truly believed that was love.

"Okay. I understand."

I hung up and shook my head at the nurse.

"No family is coming."

I laid my hand on my belly.

"Baby, I'm sorry."

A seven-month induced labor isn't over with a single shot.

Dr. James said the fetus had been dead too long. Infection or hemorrhage could kill me at any moment.

Once all the pre-op prep was done, a nurse slipped a cervical-softening tablet inside me, then turned and closed the door of the room. I'd braced for pain. I hadn't known it would be like this.

At eleven that night, the contractions started.

The early ones I could bear.

When the third wave hit, I bit down on the pillowcase, afraid I'd scream.

In the small hours there were no gaps between the pains. My belly twisted and wrung itself over and over.

The pressure in my abdomen was too much, and my stomach started bleeding again. I turned my head and brought up dark blood and bile.

"Ms. Larson, you'll feel better if you cry out."

The nurse wiped my mouth, trying to comfort me.

"Really, everyone does. No one's going to laugh at you."

I shook my head.

Because I knew that the moment I let a sound out, I'd lose hold of everything.

The pain blurred my mind until I saw my mother in her apron, ladling coffee for me through the steam.

But then I heard her say,

"You just take care of yourself, don't get in the way of Grant's work"

In the room next door, a man kept telling his wife, over and over,

"I'm here, sweetheart, don't be scared, I'm right here."

A little after one in the morning, a message came from Grant Mason:

Dinner with an investor tonight, not coming back. Stop using something as inefficient as divorce to test my limits.

I pressed the screen dark and threw the phone to the far side of the pillow.

The bigger his career got, the more everything I did became, in his words, inefficient.

At four in the morning, I finally delivered the baby.

When the nurse had finished, she asked me quietly,

"Do you want to take a look?"

I shook my head. I didn't dare. I was afraid that if I looked, I'd be trapped in that image and never get out.

She turned to go. I called her back.

"Wait. Was it a boy or a girl?"

The nurse said, low,

"A girl."

I closed my eyes, and hot tears slid down past my temples into the pillow.

My girl. If she could have grown up, there was one thing I would have taught her:

If you're going to love, love yourself a little more.

They wheeled me back to the room and hung a drip to stop the bleeding.

As the nurse adjusted the flow, she said,

"Ms. Larson, rest for now. An oncologist will schedule a consultation later to evaluate your follow-up treatment plan."

After daybreak I opened my phone and saw someone in the company group had reposted something from Nora Henson's social media.

The photo was of a private dining room, seven or eight glasses on the table:

Taken such good care of. Thank you, Mr. Mason. My stomach really can't drink anymore.

A coworker had commented underneath:

Mr. Mason is so thoughtful

I stared at those words for a long time.

I didn't need to have been at that dinner last night to know how Grant would have answered:

"Secretary Henson isn't well. Special circumstances, special treatment."

After it ended he'd probably dropped her off on the way, telling her in the car,

"Go in for another checkup tomorrow. You can't let a stomach bug drag on."

For the efficient Secretary Henson, his patience was always plentiful.

Sunlight slanted through the window onto the blanket.

And all at once it came clear to me.

I didn't have many days left. I never wanted to spend another minute of them thinking about him.

Three days after the induced labor, oncology came to consult.

Dr. Dickerson went through my test reports one sheet at a time, reading slowly.

"Anemia. Hemoglobin's at fifty-eight. Malnutrition."

"The lesion in your stomach is still bleeding, and there's widespread metastasis in the abdominal cavity."

He looked up at me.

"Ms. Larson, your body can't handle standard chemotherapy right now. The drugs are highly toxic. You wouldn't get through it."

I asked flatly,

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

He paused.

"Let's build up your nutrition first. Once your levels come up, we can try palliative chemo."

"But I have to be honest with you. Even with chemo, all it does is buy time. It won't cure you."

I pressed further,

"How much time could it buy?"

He was quiet, looking back down at the sheets in his hand.

I was grateful for his silence. It meant he was actually calculating, not just placating me.

"If we stop the bleeding and get your nutrition up, optimistically you'd have six months to a year."

"But your baseline is very weak right now. If there's another major bleed or organ failure, it could be just a few months."

I nodded.

In that moment I felt unexpectedly calm.

I even felt a little like laughing.

If Grant were here, he'd be very satisfied with a number like that.

Clear, quantified, measurable.

Dr. Dickerson said we could try treatment, but every chemo session needed a family member present to sign.

Except I didn't know who I'd get to sign it.

I wanted to live.

I was only twenty-seven this year. I wanted to see my mom's breakfast stand move into a bigger storefront.

I wanted to go to the coast just once, to feel the blue sky and the sea.

But my illness was already late-stage. How much longer would more treatment really buy me?

I sat in the chair, my fingertips unconsciously digging into my palm.

All the doubt and hurt I'd pushed down came slowly welling up.

At three months pregnant, the morning sickness was so bad I felt awful all over, and I tried to find him at the company without anyone noticing.

I never made it into the CEO's office. I just waited half an hour in the break room.

Nora came out and told me,

"Mr. Mason says the company is cracking down hard on office relationships right now. You'd better leave through the staff entrance."

At four months pregnant, I fell in front of the office building.

He was upstairs that day. I texted him, and he replied,

Have HR take you to the hospital. Don't disrupt the other departments' work.

The day I first got the biopsy report, my first instinct was still to go to him.

I walked from the hospital back to the company with the diagnosis in my hand, and I walked that stretch very slowly.

The whole way, I rehearsed my opening lines in my head, over and over.

I told myself, lying to myself, that in the face of life and death he'd stop and really look at me, that he'd remember we once promised to grow old together.

If he showed even a trace of the warmth he used to have,

then however much it hurt, however hard it got, I'd try to hold on.

Then I ran into the two of them in the elevator lobby.

He said, "Stomach trouble is no small thing. Rules are made by people too."

To go along with the rule he'd set banning office relationships,

I'd worked as an ordinary employee in the marketing department while I was heavily pregnant, and not one person on the whole floor knew I was his wife.

Now he was making an exception.

It wasn't that he didn't know how to be tender. He just wasn't tender toward me.

On the fifth day in the hospital, another photo went up in the company group chat.

The hospital's registration hall, him standing in line at the window, a cup of warm porridge in his hand.

Someone in the group asked if Secretary Henson wasn't feeling well.

Grant stepped in himself to protect her reputation:

Secretary Henson had some stomach upset from entertaining an investor. I came along to have her checked out. There's no need to read too much into it.

But when I took frequent leave during my pregnancy because of my health, and the department started whispering about it, he ignored it completely.

"Personal health issues for an ordinary employee are minor. Ignore them and it'll die down on its own."

His so-called avoiding-suspicion was nothing but an excuse.

The sun was fine outside, the ward bright, and still I felt the cold seep into the gaps between my bones.

A week later, my levels were barely stable, and I could be discharged.

Dr. Dickerson wrote up the paperwork and told me to come back in two weeks to assess the chemo situation.

"You have to come. Don't carry it all by yourself."

"Okay."

When I said okay, I was thinking about something else.

Go back, and clear away every trace that I'd ever existed in that home, one piece at a time.

I went home while he was at work.

Ten o'clock, and the place was quiet.

Sunlight spilled across the rooms. This had once been my safe harbor.

But something in me had changed, and now everything around me felt cold.

I started with the master bedroom.

Four bags of clothes, two boxes of books.

And the cup with the chipped rim, the one he'd said more than once should be thrown out.

I washed it clean, wrapped it in newspaper, set it in a box.

My prenatal checkup schedule was still stuck to the fridge door under a magnet.

I read it through, one line at a time, then peeled it off and dropped it in the trash bag.

I sat on the floor and deleted the eight hundred-some photos of us from my phone, one by one.

Photos from our college days, snapshots of ordinary life.

And the pictures from all the firsts we'd walked through together.

The last photo.

It was us outside the county clerk's office the day we got our license.

He wasn't used to smiling; the corner of his mouth barely lifted.

I stared at it for a moment, then tapped delete.

The screen showed a prompt:

Deleted photos will be permanently removed after 30 days.

Thirty days?

I'd probably last a little longer than that.

I went and changed the beneficiary on one of my insurance policies.

The clerk asked who I wanted it changed to.

It had originally been Grant Mason. His career was at its peak now; he wouldn't want that small payout anyway.

I wrote down my mother's name.

I didn't take the marriage certificate.

I slid the documents into an envelope and put a note in with them:

You've already signed the divorce agreement. I'm leaving you the certificate so it's easier for you to file the paperwork.

After thinking it over, I added a copy of the induced-labor consent form too.

I knew he'd open this drawer sooner or later. I just didn't want to explain anything ever again.

I set the envelope at the very back of the study drawer, under a few old contracts.

On my way down I passed a stationery store and went in to buy a notebook.

Plain, no pattern, cheap.

On the flyleaf I wrote, stroke by stroke:

Lend me a little more time, so I can forget you.

I called it The Forgetting Plan.

I didn't want to carry these ten years of love and pain with me.

Hate takes too much strength, and strength was the one thing I had least of now.

Love was worse. It would leave me aching, watching for something that would never come.

I wanted none of it.

Lately I'd noticed the anemia and the failing body had started to weaken my memory.

Sometimes I couldn't even recall what a nurse had said to me a second ago.

If that was how it was, I might as well go with it and wash away every part that had to do with him.

On the first page I wrote:

Today, forget how he carried me back to the dorm in the rain in college. Memories are invalid variables. As of today, reset them all to zero.

Invalid variable was a phrase he liked. I borrowed it.

The things I'd bought for the baby during the pregnancy were in the cabinet in the second bedroom.

Four onesies, six pairs of socks, and some crib bedding.

I'd spent a long time picking them out at the store.

I folded each one, packed them into a carton, and mailed it to a charity.

Some child could always use them.

That afternoon I went to the office to resign.

HR asked me why. I said it was for personal growth.

She clicked a few times in the system.

"Ms. Larson, you've been here more than three years."

"Yeah. More than three years."

My hand shook a little when I signed. She didn't notice.

They didn't know I was Mr. Mason's wife, so of course no one would tell him about one small employee leaving.

I carried the sorted old files from the marketing department over to the administrative storeroom.

The storeroom happened to be the utility closet right next to the CEO's office.

His door was ajar, and Nora Henson's considerate voice drifted out:

"Mr. Mason, your wife hasn't been giving you trouble lately, has she?"

"Pregnant women get moody. Don't take it to heart. Not everyone can stay as level-headed as you all the time."

Secretary Henson never said a single bad word about me, yet she always managed to paint me as an unreasonable nuisance.

Grant's voice came:

"That kind of pointless emotional drain is something she should handle on her own."

I stood outside the door and smiled a little.

Yes. I was handling it.

The baby, the cancer, the marriage, and our ten years. Handling all of it at once.

I transferred some money to my mom with a note: year-end bonus.

She wrote back right away:

This much? Go easy with it. Don't give it all to me.

I answered sweetly that I would.

Then I added a neighbor from her community, an older woman, and asked her to look in on my mom now and then.

I only said I was going far away, with no set return date.

I sent her two thousand. She refused for a while before she finally accepted.

My last night in that home.

Grant came back a little after one in the morning. I was already lying down.

He showered, got into bed, and rarely, held me from behind.

He hadn't held me like that in more than half a year.

I guessed it was because I'd been too quiet lately, and he'd sensed something.

Or maybe it was unease at an unknown variable showing up in his control system.

In the dark I lay with my eyes open and asked him one last question:

"Grant, if you could do it all over, would you still marry me?"

He was already half asleep. He grunted something vague:

"Don't dwell on pointless things. Go to sleep."

I lay still in the dark, listening to his breathing.

Even, steady.

Before dawn I slipped my body out from under his arm.

I pulled the packed suitcase along, and the click of the lock latch as the door shut felt like the period at the end of our story.