Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

trying to figure me out. “Rebecca? Hey, I didn’t know you cared.”
    “It’s not you. It’s just so sad— first the mom and now maybe the daughter. And that poor man half out of his mind about the whole thing.”
    “Yeah, well, he drinks, too.”
    But I was sunk in the Dunson family drama, and sobbing.
    “Hey. Hey, hold on a minute.” He looked nearly as confused as when Adrienne had cried and needed him to hold her. But he had the sense to gather me up without being prodded. “It’s okay. That’s a good girl. Cry all you want. That’s a baby.” If I weren’t in such a state I would have fallen off my chair at the realization he even knew these phrases. Perhaps he’d been dating a mother with a baby.
    Finally, when I was starting to get a grip, he pushed me away, as he had Adrienne, and looked me straight in the eye, assessing. “Something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong. This isn’t like you. You’re raw. That’s why that story got you, because your hide’s thin.”
    Hide was a good word in the circumstances, one Dr. Freud would have approved of; that was what I couldn’t do anymore.
    I tried to muster bravado. “I’m scared, that’s all.” I spoke as if it were nothing. “I had a breast biopsy yesterday.”
    His face was a picture of confidence shattered: one minute I was strong, healthy Rebecca, the next I was a broken victim. His voice was a croak: “You have…” long pause “…cancer?”
    “The test results aren’t in. But I’ve got a lump, and I’m scared. I’m a little weird.” I said again, “That’s all,” and wondered if that would satisfy him, if he would change the subject.
    He said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” nearly whispering, incredulous.
    “I just felt like it was more than anyone could deal with right now. Chris’s career depends on my being strong. I didn’t want to be a liability.” He looked utterly unbelieving. “I don’t know! I just couldn’t talk about it. It was too close to the bone to hand over to another human being— and it was killing me not to do that. You see how I am. It was nuts.” I let that stand for a second and then I blurted, “Don’t you have any secrets?”
    He just stared, alarm in every cell, every bit the trapped fox Dunson had been. I didn’t let him off the hook.
    I said, “Come on, you know mine. Don’t you have one?”
    In a moment he recovered enough to say, “You don’t have to change the subject. You can talk about it.”
    But I was thinking about that look, the trapped-fox look, and what it meant. He’d never told me he loved me, I thought, never told me good-bye when I broke away, never said he’d miss me. Never anything , I thought. Does he have feelings? Are they his secrets?
    I thought I’d hit on something. I knew he had feelings, some of them for me— I could tell by the look on his face when I said the B word. But never, never was I going to hear it from Mr. Rob I’m-a-self-contained-unit Burns. The thought of it made me cry again. Through what was left of my formerly tough hide, just a veil of thin, thin skin, I seemed to be absorbing everyone’s pain.
    “Beck? Beck, what is it?” The silvery mane of my father— and the rest of his head— poked in the office. “Daddy!”
    “I— uh— I guess I should have called.” He looked acutely embarrassed, and then angry. “Rob, what’s going on here?” He spoke like some medieval king challenging a knight who’d made his daughter cry. The last thing I needed was time travel to the twelfth century.
    “Dad, this is none of your business.”
    Like a dog paddled for something it doesn’t understand, Rob stared at the floor. My hero. “Hello, Isaac.” My father gave him the glare that had been turning witnesses to jelly for nearly half a century. In a moment, Rob would confess on the stand: “I did it! I killed Rebecca with my little hatchet.”
    I wanted to yell at them both. I turned to get my coat and in the process heard Rob say, “I was just leaving.” I shrugged into the jacket, turning back to Dad, seeing Rob’s back. He didn’t even say, “See ya,” having apparently forgotten my existence.
    “Come on, Dad, let’s take a walk. Suddenly I need a whole lot of air.”
    My father was nearly seventy. Was he too old a dog to learn anything? Probably, but I felt stepped on; surely feminism began at home.
    I was so angry I didn’t speak on the elevator ride, and only when I felt a blast of cold air (in San Francisco we