Free You're Not You by Michelle Wildgen Page A

offhandedly about another scone when I came to a section on prognosis.
Long-term prognosis varies for each patient
, the print read,
but the average time span from diagnosis to death is approximately two to five years
.
    I sat there, perfectly still, and read it again, and still again. The sun coming in through the glass was broiling. I felt the sheen of sweat on my face, prickling in my armpits.
    Around me, people were chatting, tapping their fingers on the tables, tearing into oversize cookies and pastries, spooning the whipped cream off iced drinks. I watched them, dropping napkins as they went, slopping liquid on the tabletops, shielding their eyes with sunglasses as they went out the front door.
     
    WHEN I GOT HOME , I could hear our stereo from the driveway. The window frames were trembling slightly. Jill was in the mood to go out.
    She heard me come in and walked out of her bedroom in a short robe, a towel around her head. “Hey!” she exclaimed. The prospect of going out often excited her more than the actual evening. She liked sipping the celebratory beer while she dressed, the festive announcement of the loud music.
    She was holding an eye pencil. As I got closer I saw that one of her eyes was made-up, the other undone. I set
Living with ALS
on the coffee table, gazed at the plain block letters on the blue cover for a moment, then turned it facedown.
    “I forgot and did one eye, but you can do the other if you want,” Jill said, holding out the eyeliner. I shook my head. My resolve was flattened.
    “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Just go ahead and do your makeup tonight.”
    She shrugged, set the pencil down, and took the towel off of her head, running her fingers through her hair. “How was work?”
    For a moment I couldn’t even remember. Then it all came back to me.
    “What are you wincing at?” Jill paused with her hands still tangled in her damp hair, staring at me.
    “Nothing,” I said. I stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes. “It was a hard day. I got her up and showered her and that was maybe the worst part. I don’t think you told me it was this hard.” I fanned myself with my shirt, giving it up after a moment. It wasn’t doing any good anyway.
    “Didn’t I? I don’t remember it being so hard. I remember it more as weird at first,” she said.
    “Oh come on,” I said. “Just say it was hard, Jill. You always talked about how nice they all were but I’m on to it now, you know. You didn’t want to admit it just sucked.”
    Looking at her now I felt as though the whole thing was her fault: She was the one who used to say that volunteering at the home had been such an amazing experience, so fulfilling. I never would have thought I could do this if it weren’t for her. I would have volunteered with Greenpeace if I wanted to make a difference so badly, become one of the people who accosted you with their notepads at the bottom of Bascom Hill.
    “It didn’t suck,” she protested. She looked at me and sighed, then sat down at the end of the couch, moving my feet out of the way. “It kind of sucked. At first. But it got better. I didn’t want to complain.”
    This only made me feel surlier. I wanted to complain. Jill was always trying to put the best face on things, which right now seemed like pure fraud to me. The thing about Jill, which it had taken me some time to realize after she started piercing her ears all the way up into the cartilage and dyeing her hair pink in high school, was that she looked rebellious, but her upbringing, our town’s characteristic churchgoing and community-centered activities, had left their mark on her. Hence the volunteer work, the glossing of what I now thought must have been a truly hellish job into something sweet and edifying.
    “How did you feel about all those people?” I asked. “You knew they might die any time, right?”
    She paused, tapping her eyeliner thoughtfully against her front teeth. “Deep down, for some of them,