Before You Leap

Fiction by ​​Brian Moore

Wyatt started drawing the way any kid does: crayons on the wall, finger painting in kindergarten, connect-the-dot books for Christmas. But he didn't stop where he was supposed to stop. He kept straying off the page and the lines, as if nothing was big enough, scrawling over every scrap of paper he could find. He doodled into the white space of old newspapers and his mother's recipe magazines and the backs of handouts from school. He drew on the Learning to Read and Fun With Numbers workbooks and when he ran out of paper he tattooed his palms with ballpoint pens so that he wouldn't forget. For his birthday, his mother gave him a big notepad and a case of professional colour pencils from the art supplies store. If people came too close he covered the notepad with his arms and pretended it was homework. You didn't show off things like that.
 
The day he fell in the playground he was not watching, thinking about something he had drawn, something kiddish, like a robot or a martian, something stupid enough that he had some hope of getting it perfect. He must have tripped. It was late and he was all alone. When he stood up the pavement tilted, spun away, and dumped him off his feet again. He lay with his face against the cement, the world very high up and quiet and a soft rain coming down. He tasted blood and dirt in his mouth and the blood poured out in a great splash on the asphalt. He had just turned seven.
 
Next morning he told his mother and father at breakfast that there was something wrong with his skin.
 
What do you mean?
 
When I bleed it doesn't stop for a long time.
 
They took him to Emergency. He had to wear clothing like a girl's dress that tied with strings at the back. Everything was cold and they put needles into him that were longer than his wrist was wide. They kept him overnight for tests. Nights became weeks. He had leukemia.
 
From his bed he drew what he could not see from the hospital window: oceans, mountains, valleys, birds with canopy wings. Nothing he drew matched the feeling of what was in his head. He couldn't sleep, thinking about what he wanted to draw. He knew that people sometimes died when they closed their eyes, a faraway thing that happened to adults, a slippery fall and nothing below. He made promises to God and kept drawing.
 
One day the nurse led him to the play room in Pediatrics and told him to wait there until she came for him. The floor of the room was covered with tarp and newspapers and a man leaned against the windows with an artist's brush poised in his hand. He had sketched the empty outline of a jungle around all the walls of the room. It was a jungle of vines and trees, of elephants, giraffes, monkeys, hippos, and cheetahs — a Western child's idea of Africa. They were meant to be friendly animals, like in the cartoons. The man handed the brush to Wyatt. Think of it as a giant paint-by-number, he said. I want you to be the first to colour it in. The man lined up cans of acrylic in a straight row of rainbow on the tarp and nudged Wyatt up to the wall. He told him to paint the lion.
 
What colour, Wyatt asked.
 
Courage, the man said.
 
When Wyatt finished, the man stood still for a long time. Wyatt was afraid that he had done something wrong. The man asked, What do you want to be when you grow up?
 
 Wyatt said the first idea that came into his head: I want to be a doctor.
 
The man nodded but the interest faded out of his face. He said, I think you should choose something further away from where you are.
 
Between treatments Wyatt went back to school. At recess, he stayed near the door, away from tag and the monkey bars and the chalked hopscotch squares. There was too much at risk. He found a safe corner behind a storage shed and sat cross-legged on the ground, his notebook in his lap. School had no practical purpose. It just stole time from drawing.
 
In the spring, his father flew away to British Columbia. Mother said the bills, arguments, and late-night vigils just wore him out.
 
At first, people let him be, because he had been sick. The doctor told him he was in remission, which should have been good news. But the differences between him and others piled up. By the end of middle school, he knew he was better off alone instead of trying to fit in. His pictures began to change. The sun in the old drawings was too meek for mountains. He let the sky in his notepads darken and thicken with bruises and scars, swelling to black. Each afternoon, when he came home from class, he closed the door of his bedroom, clamped on headphones, and plugged into white noise metal on his father's old stereo, the bass beat thumping through his chest. The music scoured him from the inside. He filled the sheets of his sketch pad with deformities, with starved bodies, pared down to bones and fangs, with apocalypse and wasteland smoking in the background. He bundled up the pages from before the hospital and burned them beside the dumpster behind his building.
 
He thought high school would be different but the rules only became more complicated, the bullshit deeper. At the end of twelfth grade he knew he never wanted to open a book again for the rest of his life. For a year he bummed around, working road construction in the summer and shifts at burger joints in the winter. He applied to Custodial Services at the hospital, the place he knew best.
 
He was only on the job a month when they sent him up to Pediatrics to re-decorate.
 
The sun had faded the green out of the jungle in the play room, erased the neck of the giraffe, de-spotted the cheetah. The nurses wanted to cover up the whole sad thing. Make it bright and modern. Make it big. Sprawling decals of Transformers, Death Stars, SpongeBobs, and Mutant Turtles shipped in from Walmart. They moved the toys out of the room so that Wyatt could work. He began by rolling the wall with primer, then a flat white base, starting against the windows and moving across to the hippos. When he came to the lion he paused, touched it with the tips of his fingers, traced the chips and peels in the paint, the fat circle of the nose. The lion was the fiercest red he could imagine. The most stubborn, the most unforgiving. Not like a real lion at all. He painted over the lion last, three coats to cover it up.
 
***
 
For a long time he did not draw. He lived in a new, smaller apartment with his mother, boxed in, husbands and wives shouting through the walls, the smell of marijuana in the stairwells, gangbangers clustered around cars in the parking lot, waiting for something to happen. He had books of unfinished drawings in a milk carton at the bottom of his closet, underneath his shoes, and he began to forget they were there. If you can't make something perfect and beautiful, why bother? If you don't have the talent, just stop.
 
But sometimes his fingers itched. He dabbled, to pass the time. The year he turned twenty-five he opened a sketch book in the GP's waiting room and sketched a profile of the receptionist, not because she was interesting but just because she was there. It was still garbage. When she called his name, he left the book on the table with the magazines.
 
The doctor was very careful and polite. Four years since his last checkup. She understood that young men take their health for granted but it was important that he start annual CT scans again as a precaution. He nodded, folding his hands in his lap. He would have had difficulty drawing his own face because he kept his expression to a minimum.
 
The following week Wyatt took the elevator down to the Imaging Department at the hospital and changed into hospital greens. He stuffed his shirt, pants, and wallet into a plastic bag closed with a drawstring. Please take all valuables with you. We are not liable for theft or loss. The floor was ice even through his socks. Patients waited to be called in an adjacent room, their clothing bagged up and clutched in their laps, gowns open at the rear, underweared buttocks pressed into vinyl seats. He eased into a chair. A TV bolted to the wall recited the news.
 
A girl on the other side of the room scrolled her phone with a taloned index finger. She looked a little younger than him - twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. She glanced at him and leaned forward.
 
"I can see you," she whispered, just loud enough for everyone to hear.
 
"Oh, shit." He crossed his legs. She laughed. Her eyes narrowed, as if they were twelve and she had taken his lunch money.
 
He turned his head to the television. He had seen her too: a gush of blonde hair, a face all angles and freckles. A voice like some of the girls he had met in school: sweet and sour.
 
After his CT scan, he dressed and looked for her in the waiting room but she had already gone.
 
The Imaging department was in the old wing of the hospital. The new section was called the Odelle Centre. All the oncology departments were in Odelle and cancer patients shuttled between the two buildings, carrying their hospital cards and appointment sheets, most in street clothes, but some in robes and slippers, trundling IV stands. Where the old hospital was olive and grey and cinder block, the Odelle next door was a modern, pastel cathedral with banners and comfortable couches and an atrium soaring up to a glass ceiling.
 
To get from Imaging to Odelle Wyatt had to cross a long, underground hallway between the buildings, so long it seemed to dip in the middle, like a suspension bridge. The girl from the waiting room was halfway down the corridor, paused in front of a painting on the wall.
 
"I hope you're not embarrassed," she said.
 
"No, I'm not embarrassed. I just haven't gotten used to being half-naked in front of strangers."
 
"I can think of worse things. Have you seen these?"
 
She nodded at a small, ceramic plaque. A meadow washed across the middle of the plaque, the way a kindergartner would draw it, with a plump, yellow sun, balloon-petaled flowers, and clusters of umbrella-topped trees. "Agatha" was written in ragged, diagonal capitals at the corner. He was not clear if Agatha was the title or the artist. The inscription beneath read: I drew this because I want my sister to come home. Dozens of the tiles mosaicked the walls, door to door, following the same formula of picture, name, message. He had seen them before but never paid any attention. The hospital brimmed with signs, directions, and requests for money.
 
She laid the pads of her fingertips on the plaque.
 
"Feel this." He put his hand beside hers. The surface of the tablet was smooth and hard but the hardness made it seem brittle, like spring ice on a puddle.
 
She led him further down the hall, stopping every few feet to read a tile and then another tile. Some kind of art therapy project. There was no explanation. But all cancer. Victims, survivors, families, friends.
 
"I bet only the people who drew these knew who they were for," she said, as if she felt a weight bearing down on them, an ocean of lives looming over their heads.
 
"I don't see why," he said.
 
"What do you mean?"
 
"The purpose. The point."
 
"It doesn't need to have a point. Making art is the point."
 
He thought the way she said "art" sounded borrowed, a cheat, the way people talk louder to convince themselves. He pretended to look at the tile, hoping she wouldn't leave. If he drew her he would have outlined her nose and cheeks and eyebrows in black marker and made a thin curve of watered blue for her lips. Like lightning at night. He would have left her skin as an absence. She was more attractive with parts of her unknown.
 
"They're not very good," he said. "Actually, they're terrible."
 
"They're not supposed to be the Mona Lisa. People painted them to make their grief tangible, to release it."
 
"Oh, I see. It's an enema."
 
She took her hand back from the tile. She hid her irritation well.
 
"All these people are saying is: she was here and we loved her. We won't forget. She mattered."
 
 "I'm not worried about being remembered."
 
She folded her arms. When she began to open her mouth again he said: "I have a name, by the way. Wyatt."
 
"I'm Taylor. I guess you have cancer too?"
 
"I had leukemia when I was small but it's been gone for years. I'm just here for checkup."
 
While he had been going through his childhood chemo, his mother had latched on to a saying to defend their crumbling position in the world: look before you leap. She often used it to halt him in his tracks, like an elephant gun, whenever he showed signs of risk-taking. He heard his mother as if she were standing behind him, and he ignored her.
 
"Would you like to get a coffee?" he asked.
 
She was wearing a sweater of some shade of ivory, with a V-neck. He tried not to look at her breasts.
 
"My boyfriend is picking me up in a few minutes. My live-in boyfriend."
 
"Oh. I didn't know."
 
"I've also got Stage III lymphoma"
 
"I didn't know."
 
"That's right. How would you know? Just because I'm in a friggin' hospital."
 
She snapped open her purse, dug inside, pulled out a folded sheet of paper and offered it to him. The sheet was filled with headings in bold, urgent italics. It was the kind of photocopied announcement he saw pinned to clinic bulletin boards, then forgotten and snowed under by more announcements.
 
"CancerCare runs a drop-in on Wednesdays. If you ever want somebody to talk to. You know, in case you noticed you weren't the world's only sick person. I've been going there since I found out in September. They have coffee."
 
She left, like a switch turned off, and he was stuck with the pictures on the wall. He watched her until she turned a corner into Odelle.
 
The memory of his father said: quit while you're ahead.
 
***
 
He kept the sheet of paper she gave him and showed up the following Wednesday night at a conference room in Odelle. The facilitator bunched them into a circle of chairs. Wyatt introduced himself when prompted, feeling very AA, but dodging explanations, saying as little as possible. At the end of the meeting he said hello to Taylor but even when she brushed his arm, accidentally, or introduced him around, she always moved on quickly, grazing the room. He went to three more meetings. Twice she let him buy her lunch at the hospital cafeteria.
 
They exchanged summaries of childhood and adolescence. They always seemed to be on the verge of something but words weren't enough to tip them forward. They argued and the silences lengthened. By August she no long replied to his texts. He took the hint.
 
Later that winter his mother slipped on ice and fractured her ankle—nothing serious, but she needed to recover in the hospital for a few days. He spent the afternoon gathering up supplies for her stay—bags of bathrobes, socks, underwear, her hypoallergenic moisturizers, and her vitamins—as if stocking up for a prolonged siege. Once the initial painkillers dissipated she was relieved and chatty, a girl on an adventure in an exotic country.
 
"Did you lock everything?"
 
"Yes," he said.
 
"Did you check the mail?"
 
"Yes."
 
"What a mess. What are they going to do with me?"
 
The nurses loved his mother. They encouraged Wyatt. You're a good son, so patient. You're all she has. His mother reminded everyone that Wyatt worked in the hospital too.
 
He came to visit her every afternoon, but the hours were long, listening and nodding in a hard chair pulled up to her bed. Yes, I'll remember to put the garbage out. No, I already fed the cat this morning. The ache tightened his back and he bent over his knees, hanging his head to untie the stiffness.
 
"I'm going downstairs to the food court. Do you want anything?"
 
"No, I'm fine," she said. "I'm sure you need a break from all this. But hurry back. I don't want to be alone for supper."
 
He wandered through the atrium on the ground floor, killing time. Outside the Blood Work bay he saw Taylor's thin, knobbed shoulders ahead of him. She was in the last row of chairs, a puff of cotton bandaged to her left elbow where vials had been syringed. Waiting, waiting, stroking her phone. She had sharpened her hair to a colour like cobalt frost and gelled it into spikes. Her mouth a burst of wet gloss. Makeup changes to cover the effects of chemo between treatment cycles.
 
"Hey."
 
Taylor glanced up. "Hey yourself."
 
"You act like you don't remember me."
 
"I thought you were the one who wanted to be forgotten?"
 
The waiting area was full of old people, glancing up from magazines, consulting watches. In the hospital, nothing ever seemed to proceed in a straight line from start to finish. They were all fastened to bits and pieces of confused hope, drifting out to sea.
 
"You still owe me a coffee," he said.
 
She considered. Calculated equations of time and disappointment. She pocketed her phone.
 
"Coffee doesn't taste good anymore. Let's go for a walk."
 
She had done the drugs. Then done them again. She went through the baldness, the stubbled reveal, and when the blonde bangs refused to come back blonde she blasted them with Clairol. Painted eyebrows. False lashes. You men don't know what we have to go through. Always replacing our selves with images of someone else.
 
"You look fine," he said. It was a flimsy, reflex compliment. She may not have heard him. She kept looking around, folded up inside herself.
 
They walked to the end of the old building, past a series of shuttered offices. The floor changed from speckled white to cement gray. Instead of stretchers, their path was cluttered with laundry carts. They turned a corner. The overheads were dimmer, as if they were descending into an early autumn evening. The engine of the building's heating thrummed closer.
 
"What have they got you on now?" he asked.
 
"I'm between. The oncologist and the endocrinologist are in a big argument. He wants me to do a clinical trial in Montreal. She wants me back in radiation. I don't think they like each other." She fluttered her hands, like a butterfly unable to land. "They want me to be their science fair project."
 
It was a kind of narcissism, how the world revolves around a point, a bulls-eye of tumour under your skin.
 
 "Ask me about men," she said
 
"What about men?"
 
"They're all assholes."
 
Forewarned. "Did your boyfriend move out?"
 
"Left in every way except one. His body is still there. Oh, and his junk is still in the basement where I threw it after the last fight. Some people are just lousy about sickness."
 
They stopped at an intersection. Arrows of bright colours radiated off the walls in all directions, pointing to other wings, the gift store, the exit.
 
"Where do you want to go?" she said.
 
"Doesn't matter."
 
She looked at him as if he was failing her, as if he had ceased trying.
 
"This way," she said.
 
Taylor led him down an aisle labelled Diagnostics, her pace increasing. She batted open a door and they entered a room cluttered with machines draped in spools of black cables. In the centre, an abandoned gurney. An atmosphere of ammonia and a sweetness like children's cough syrup.
 
"Let's stop," she said.
 
He was a big man, and he wasn't. Two hundred and thirty pounds overflowing a five foot nine frame. He sat down, swung his short legs up, heard the gurney creak under him. His shoulders bent like the handle of a cane. So many drugs and biopsies and needles remembered on his skin. She stared down at him and he was terrified of being wrong.
 
"You don't have to do this."
 
"Shut up, shut up."
 
She shimmied over him, unzipped, shucked, and searched. Her breathing deepened, warm and desperate in his face. She had a mole on her neck that he felt he should caress, the only blemish he could see. She strained against him. His hands fell on her thighs and he grunted and stared up at the ceiling. He had made so many mistakes. Too much patience and waiting. People who didn't know anything kept saying life is too short. Too short for what? The building hummed. Eight stories above, his mother recuperated.
 
Taylor lay on his chest and the room cooled around them. Her heart staccatoed against his ribs like a small animal. He wished he was thinner, stronger, smarter. He was tired of coping.
 
After a few minutes she sat up, buttoned her jeans and walked to the door. He followed her past the physical plant to an indoor courtyard decorated with ferns and bonsai and a waterfall fountain, its bottom glimmering with quarters and dimes. Busy people hustled through. One woman laughed and waved goodbye to another.
 
She leaned against him but there was no warmth or embrace or future, only exhaustion hunkering down. He had felt the otherness while she rode him, as if she were using sex to take back something that had been stolen. They were at an end, not a beginning.
 
He needed to tell her because he had no one else who was even close to understanding how he felt.
 
"My cancer is back."
 
He said it quietly, the way you tell a friend it's raining or the train is late or I have to go home. Very matter-of-fact. She slid her hand up his arm, as though she had known for a long time and was just waiting for him to tell her.
 
"I'm sorry," she said. "When did you find out?"
 
"Two months ago."
 
"I could tell you had changed since I last saw you. I've been bitchy about a lot of things but I hope you understand I can't carry more than I am now. I never meant to hurt you."
 
"You didn't. No danger of that. I've known the odds since I was a kid. It's just that you get used to forgetting about it."
 
"What kind of treatment will you have to do?"
 
"No more treatments. I'm finished."
 
"What?" Her mouth widened.
 
"I'm quitting cancer. Whatever happens, happens."
 
"You can't do that." As though he had found a way to subvert gravity.
 
"It's done. How long has it been for you? Nine months? I've been circling the same drain since I was seven." He sounded as if he were accusing her, as if she hadn't paid her dues. It was ridiculous, obscene, but it made him feel better. He didn't owe her.
 
"I don't want to do this anymore."
 
He had been making plans since the last scan came back with white spots in his abdomen. No more earnest delivery of bad news. To have survived childhood leukemia only to be hit with stomach cancer when he was twenty-five—wasn't that enough for one lifetime?
 
"I called my father out west. He can put me up for a few weeks, maybe months, until I figure out what's next."
 
He said he was going to BC because he missed his father but that wasn't all of it. He wanted to drive through the Rockies, Golden and Revelstoke, along the Fraser River and down through Hells Gate to Vancouver, from the sky to the sea. As far west as he could go without discarding the whole continent. Postcard fantasies. But why not? He imagined sitting on the stone beach of a glacial lake at dawn with his pad and his pencils, alone, time ticking down inside of him, and the peaks immovable and white-clad above the trees. Miles of silence for the first time in his life.
 
They gave him a year. But it wasn't theirs to give or take.
 
He placed his hand on her face and she flinched, some kind of bad memories ghosting in her nerves. His fingers threaded into her hair, just curious to see how it felt. The shape of her cheek in his palm was more true than anything he had drawn.
 
"I'm going to miss you," she said.
 
He didn't believe her. He chose not to. She hugged him in a way that was like clinging to life.
 
***
 
On the day of his mother's discharge Wyatt went downstairs to get the car and pull it up to the entrance. To reach the bank of elevators to his mother's ward he had to pass through the same underground hallway where Taylor had argued for art and memory.
 
The last tile next to the exit was new, had been hung separate from the others. The image was of a small, barefoot girl flying above a lake. The blue and gray waves licked at her heels. The girl leaned forward, with her arms flung out, leaping into space. Her eyes were closed and her lips wide. She was sick. Her skin throbbed with lesions of purple and yellow and tangerine. The face withheld so much longing that it was an old face. The hair flowed away in tsunami waves, flaxen, with flecks of true, true red, like cuts too thin to bleed.
 
I want to live, the tile said.
 
He lay his hand over the name. The script was embossed and warm to the touch, as if it had been held by someone else a moment ago.
 
He had told his father he would drive out west in March, one more leap of faith. His father promised him mountains and gorges and a clean sky to draw. Wyatt might even ask his mother to join them.
 
His fingers were hungry again. The beauty in his head was sharp and fresh and ready for paper. As long as he kept the end far enough away, it wasn't really there.
 
The lion as fierce as it gets.
​

Brian Moore

Brian Moore lives in Toronto, Canada where he worked as a project manager. He is previously published in Gravel, Everyday Fiction, and Blank Spaces.