Page 60 of Call Off the Dark

“That doesn’t sound like a very good contract,” she had said.

Her boss had given her a look, so she’d shut her mouth then.

And she shut her mouth now too and called an impromptu working lunch in the conference room with her team to discuss new ideas. During the meeting, Mariana kept messing around on her phone until finally Helen snapped, “Is that work-related, or are you texting right now?”

“Sorry.” Mariana’s face turned red, and she put her phone down on the conference table. “I was just wondering if everyone is doing costumes next week for Halloween.”

Helen blinked. “The company allows it, yes. But I don’t know about everyone.”

Mariana was a bubbly twenty-two-year-old with Betty Boop eyes, and she was dating a guy named Javier who was on another team at the firm.

Once Helen had become aware of it, she couldn’t stop seeing their burgeoning romance. The placement of their cubicles meant both passed by her office often, and she regularly viewed them through her glass wall. All their little looks they thought were so cloak-and-dagger. The way they rested their hands side by side on the cubicle wall during all-office meetings and touched fingers every so often. How they’d wait for each other in the hallway at lunchtime so they could go off together. Yesterday, she had seen them come back to the office with lollipops in their mouths. Lollipops!

Most days, Helen didn’t have time to take lunch outside the office with Tyler anymore because of the Boom Now account. Besides, they couldn’t waste their money on restaurant food anyway. They were saving up for the house. Sometimes they met on the rooftop deck for fifteen minutes with their sack lunches. The lunches were always better when Tyler was the one who packed them, but still, she was getting tired of turkey sandwiches, apples, peanut butter crackers, hummus with carrots, and snickerdoodle cookies.

After the meeting in the conference room, Helen tossed the remains of her sack lunch in the staff kitchen garbage can. Back at her desk, she saw the email in her inbox from Tyler with a link to another real estate listing, and she deleted it without clicking it.

Helen’s knee was hurting her. She hadn’t specifically injured it, but she felt the pain radiating deep beneath her kneecap on some of her runs with Tyler. And when they’d tried to hike Tiger Mountain, they’d only made it up two miles before she said they needed to turn back. She was going to have to skip next week’s Turkey Trot 5K Run downtown. The city stores were already stringing up their holiday lights, but to her it was turning into the season of melancholy.

“You should go to physical therapy,” Tyler said.

They were standing side by side in their apartment’s cramped bathroom, sharing the pedestal sink, and Tyler was spitting little streaks of red into it.

“I don’t have time for physical therapy,” Helen said. “Do you have to floss your teeth so hard?”

“What?”

“It sounds like you’re demolishing your gums,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“Flossing like that causes gum erosion.”

“You’re a dentist now?”

“No, but the way you floss is really fucking aggressive.”

Tyler looked at her and shook his head. “Jesus, Helen.” Then he walked out of the bathroom so he could finish demolishing his gums in the kitchen.

These days, Helen didn’t feel like answering her mother’s phone calls, but having a return call hanging around on her to-do list was even worse, so when she heard the ringing and saw Mom on the screen, she reached for her cell. Her mother was probably just calling to coordinate Christmas plans anyway.

But instead, her mother said, “Oh, Helen. It’s bad news. Genessa has cancer.”

“What do you mean?”

Genessa was her cousin, and Helen only saw her at large holiday gatherings, but Genessa was six years older than Helen, and people six years older than her weren’t supposed to get cancer. Genessa had been trying to get pregnant, and now she had cancer instead?

“It’s stage one breast cancer, so they can probably just cut it out. No chemo, thank God,” her mother said.

“Oh, that’s good.” Helen suddenly felt guilty as she realized that she felt just as relieved for herself as she did for Genessa. She didn’t like the idea of her blood relatives getting cancer that young.

“Have you been doing monthly breast checks?”

Helen had not. “Of course,” she told her mother.

That night, when Helen lay down to sleep, she carefully felt her breasts and her underarms, and she told herself she would check them monthly going forward.

The next month, she forgot.