The Erasure Game

The call came at 2 AM while I was nursing a glass of whiskey and watching a baseball doubleheader on cable. A classic pitchers' duel from 1998—neither team willing to break first. My phone lit up: Sarah. She hadn't called in six months, not since the apartment went up in flames and I went running into the inferno that used to be our life together.

"I need to see you," she said, voice cracking like old parchment. "Please."

I met her at a diner off Route 9. She looked hollowed out, wearing my old sweatshirt—the one I'd left behind with half my book collection. The fluorescent lights buzzed like insects trapped in glass.

"I'm sick," she said, sliding a pill bottle across the Formica. Vitamin D3. Prescription strength. "The doctor says... it's genetic. My mother had the same tremors at thirty." She picked at the laminate table, her fingers quivering ever so slightly. "I didn't want you to find out through the grapevine. Or not at all."

"You destroyed us because you might get sick someday?"

"Because I didn't want you to watch me die."

Outside, rain began drumming against the window. The cable company had cut our service two weeks before she left—just another unpaid bill in the mountain of evidence that we were drowning. I'd spent months running from the wreckage, convincing myself solitude was safer than love's inevitable wreckage. But sitting there, watching her struggle to keep her hand steady, I understood something about cowardice and courage, about the difference between protecting someone and abandoning them.

"I'm not afraid of sick," I said. "I'm afraid of alone."

The baseball game from 1998 had gone into extra innings when I finally turned off the TV. Neither team had won, but they'd kept playing anyway. Sometimes the only thing you can control is showing up.