My Last Wish novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: What the Doctor Knows

Her therapist helps her keep the record out of Chad's hands, and the morning news names Chad Caregiver of the Year and invites her on stage.

I read the petition standing in Dane's hallway with Teddy's heavy head on my shoulder.

It called me an unstable mother with a documented history of self-harm.

It called Chad the child's primary caregiver for three years.

It did not say that I had spent all three of those years getting well.

"I'm going to call the clinic," I said.

Dane was already holding out his phone.

I called, and the receptionist put me through, and at 10:15 that morning I was back in the same grey chair I had left the day before.

The doctor sat across from me with her glasses pushed up into her hair.

She was a woman in her fifties who never wasted a word, and she read the petition twice.

"He used your note," she said.

"He used my worst day."

"Yes."

She set the pages down.

"Here is what I can tell you, Callie. A history is not a diagnosis of today. I'll write a letter that says what I've seen over a thousand days, in plain language, with dates."

"Will that be enough?"

"It is the truth. It is up to a judge what it's worth."

She pulled a form out of her drawer.

"First, though. Does your husband have access to your records?"

"He signed the release himself, the first week. He said he wanted to help."

"Do you want him to keep it?"

I looked at the form.

For a thousand days I had let him hold every piece of me, and called it trust.

I took her pen and signed.

"Good," she said. She slid it into a folder with a small, firm click.

Then she asked the question she asked every session, the one I used to hate.

"Tell me what keeps you here."

"Teddy," I said.

"And."

"The wishes."

She waited.

"Every morning, I wake up and think, I have to write today's. It's stupid. It's a jar of paper."

"It isn't stupid. It is a reason to get up at six in the morning. Which one was your favorite?"

I didn't have to think.

"A lemon tree. Wish fourteen. I wrote that I wanted something in the house that would grow while I got better."

"And did you get it?"

"Chad gave it to me with a bow on the pot."

I could still see it.

A small potted tree on the kitchen table, a hand-tied ribbon, and Chad's arm around my waist.

Look what I did for you, Cal.

The doctor wrote something down.

"Safety plan," she said, turning the page toward me.

It was the same one I had known by heart for two years.

Call Dane. If he doesn't answer, call the crisis line. Tell someone out loud before I tell myself anything.

At the bottom, in her handwriting, she had added a new line.

Chad is not on this page.

"You are allowed to have a life he isn't in," she said. "That is allowed."

I laughed once, sharply, and then I was crying.

She slid a box of tissues across the table without a word, and I took three.

It was after noon when Dane drove me back.

He had bought Teddy a juice box and kept a spare one in the cup holder for me.

I hadn't noticed him do it.

At home, he turned on the small TV on his kitchen counter for the noon news and went to find Teddy's shoes.

The host had perfect teeth and a perfect voice.

"And this week, our Caregiver of the Year nominee is a Haddon Bend man whose story has moved the whole county."

I stopped with a juice box in my hand.

There was Chad on the screen in his good grey suit, sitting on a studio couch.

He was holding a framed photograph of me.

It was a picture from our wedding, the one where I was laughing.

"My wife has lived with postpartum depression for nearly three years," he said, and his voice cracked beautifully on the last word. "I promised her, on the worst night of her life, that I would make a thousand wishes come true."

"And did you?" the host asked.

"Every one," Chad said. "I never missed a single day."

Dane came back into the kitchen with Teddy's shoes in his hand and stood very still.

The host leaned in.

"Chad will be honored at the Caregiver of the Year gala at the Haddon Hotel, two Saturdays from now."

She turned to the camera and smiled.

"And we hope his brave wife Callie will be there to join him on stage."

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