Manhattan Mayhem

THREE LITTLE WORDS by Nancy Pickard

Priscilla laughed hysterically when her doctor told her she had only a few weeks to live.

When she saw the shocked dismay on his handsome face, she waved away his worry and kept guffawing like a four-year-old who had just heard the funniest knock-knock joke on earth. And, being a preschool teacher, she knew knock-knock jokes and four-year-olds.

Knock, knock. Who’s there?

Not me!

Of course, she had a rare, virulent, quick-killing cancer.

Of course, she did! It had been that kind of week. Month. Year. Death could only improve my life, she thought, and giggled wildly again.

When she finally came out of her initial hysteria and started crying the other kind of tears, her doctor handed her his box of tissues and a long thin notepad. She grabbed both but held up the notepad as she blew her nose.

“What’s this for?”

“Some of my patients like to make bucket lists.”

“Oh, God,” she said, rolling her eyes up to stare at him. “You keep a bunch of these pads in your desk? Sucks to be you! It’s life’s little ultimate to-do list, isn’t it? Buy bananas, but not too ripe. Pick up the dry cleaning, but what for? And forget the super-sized laundry soap.”

She giggled and sobbed at the same time.

“I can’t die, Sam!” She’d been his patient for a long time; he’d seen her through regular checkups and emergencies. If he called her by her first name, she’d long ago made it clear that she’d call him by his. “I don’t even have a prearrangement plan with a funeral home!”

He didn’t laugh.

“It’s not too late,” he said carefully.

“There just won’t be much ‘pre-’ to it, will there?”

“No,” he said even more gently.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Yeah, it is. I’ll be the girl with only one thing on her bucket list.”

“What?”

“Live longer.”

He looked as if he might cry.

“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling bad for him. Her humor was normally softer; incipient death had given her an edge. “It’s not your fault.”

“It’s not anybody’s fault,” he said, shaking his head and pulling out a handkerchief to wipe his eyes.

Nobody’s fault? She wasn’t so sure about that.

What about the pollution she breathed, the chemicals she drank? And what about stress? Couldn’t that kill you? Well, yes, it looked as if it could, though she probably couldn’t prove that to her stressful employer, her stressful parents, her stressful sister, her stressful boyfriend, the stressful parents at DayGlow DayCare with their screaming stressed-out children, the stressful woman with the stressful dog in the next apartment, the stressful man at the food cart with her favorite hot dogs, not to mention all the pedestrians who bumped into her on streets and taxis that honked at her in intersections.

And doctors who told her she was going to die.

He said, “If drugs aren’t going to help you, or surgery, or radiation… what do you want to do with the time you have left, Priscilla?”

“I’m only twenty-six,” she whispered, all her laughter used up now.

“I know.” His eyes filled again, but he forced an encouraging smile. “So your list ought to be a lot more fun than the one my hundred-year-old patient just drew up-”

“A hundred years old?” she said wistfully. “I wish.”

“It’s not so great. Her big moment was drinking cranberry juice in spite of being allergic to it. Go for it, Priss. Go for more than cranberry juice. Don’t hold back. Who knows? Maybe happiness will cure you.”

He didn’t believe that.

She didn’t, either.

But as a way to kill time for the next couple weeks, before time killed her, it did beat shooting herself. She said as much to Sam, which made him grimace.

“May I use your pen?”

He handed one to her and then watched her write three words at the top of the pad. She printed them with force, going over each letter multiple times, so that even from across his desk he could see the thick black letters.

She held them up for him to read: