He drove the mini-van through the stonewall streets of suburban Wellesley. She sat shotgun, shoulders tense but otherwise her demeanor was more like an anthropologist that an actual babysitter. At a stop sign they sat for a minute, blinded in the slow rhythm of passing headlights. He tried to see her face in the shadows and beams; her face was all shadows and beams.
She read somewhere--some novel that fell into her flickering attention during the chemo--that adults gradually lose their faces. The responsive and unselfconscious face that children have hardens into a shiny mask. That made some sense. He seemed all gauzed over with care and a kind of eager safeness, but still nice. And still sort of like a kid, or maybe it was only the studied appearance of vulnerability, although she wanted it to be real. He was trying to see her partly-collapsed face without looking.
And then they were driving along one of the last stone walls and the turn at the swing set was familiar and they were talking about her next surgery and the waiting and rehab. And she said that she was done with being afraid of death. That if she died that was okay but that life was so good, so so good, and she was done with being afraid to be corny.
He seemed to be thinking about how to respond, and then only pressed his lips together in place of a smile and they pulled up to her parents' untouched lawn. She was used to this, to the look of faces trying to see her face, and it didn't bother her anymore. She wanted to see their faces, too, and maybe it wasn't so different. For just a moment his face was his real face, and she had to get out of the car.
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